“It’s quarter to midnight. I’m standing in the rain outside my next-door neighbor’s house, gripping his rusted railings with cold, wet hands, staring down through them at the misshapen and perilously narrow stone steps leading to his converted basement, from which noise is blaring. It’s my least favorite song in the world: Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (FEB 13, 2014)

In Sophie Hannah’s The Orphan Choir, forty-one year old Louise Beeston may be on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Her creepy next-door neighbor, Justin Clay, plays loud music late at night, usually every other weekend. Although Louise has repeatedly implored him to stop, Clay is indifferent to her pleas. (Louise’s husband, Stuart, is oblivious to the cacophony. Even if a freight train were to pass through their bedroom, Stuart would remain asleep.) Unfortunately, Louise has little hope that Clay, a pot-smoking party animal who enjoys living it up with his loud-mouthed friends, will change his ways.

Adding to her distress is Stuart’s plan to sandblast the exterior of their sooty Cambridge home. The workman her husband hired plans to cover and seal their windows, leaving them without natural light for at least three weeks. In addition, the sandblasting will kick up a great deal of dust. All this would be bearable if Louise’s only child, seven-year-old son, Joseph, were living with them. Instead, he is a junior probationer boarding at Saviour College School, an elite educational institution that trains promising youngsters to sing religious choral music. Although Louise and Stuart see their son regularly, Joseph spends most of his time away from home. Louise hates this arrangement; she misses Joseph terribly. Stuart, on the other hand, argues that their child is happy and thriving, and should remain where he is.

As Louise narrates her tale of woe, we gradually start to wonder if she is completely sane. She admits that she is sleep-deprived, irritable, and resentful. Louise and her husband quarrel frequently and she soon becomes too distraught to go to work. Moreover, she is having troubling visions: She sees and hears a choir of children similar to her son’s, except that this group includes girls. Is Louise hallucinating? Or does this “visitation” have a deeper meaning?

The Orphan Choir is relatively brief, yet extremely vivid and powerful. The author is clever but not self-consciously so, and she uses foreshadowing skillfully to hint that everything is not as it seems. Hannah’s hard-hitting dialogue, adept use of setting, and wonderful feel for language add to the novel’s potency. We sympathize with the exhausted, frustrated, and high-strung heroine, and hope that she will somehow find the peace of mind she craves. Leave it to the talented and creative Sophie Hannah to spring some big surprises at the conclusion of this engrossing and eerie psychological thriller; the riveting finale will knock your socks off.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sophie Hannah
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Dead Lie Down

Bibliography:

• Gripless (1999)
• Cordial and Corrosive: an unfairy tale (2000)
• The Superpower of Love (2002)
• The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets : Stories (2008)
• The Orphan Choir (January 2014)

Zailer & Waterhouse Mysteries:

• Little Face (2006)
• The Wrong Mother (2008 UK; 2009 US) ( Published as The Point of Rescue) in the UK
• The Dead Lie Down (2009 UK; 2010 US) (Published as The Other Half Livesin the UK)
• The Truth Teller’s Lie (2010 UK; 2010 US) (Published as Hurting Distance in the UK)
• The Cradle in the Grave (2011) (Published as A Room Swept White in the UK)
• The Other Woman’s House (2012)  (Published as Lasting Damage in the UK)
• Kind of Cruel (2013)
• The Carrier (2014 in UK)

Note: Sophie Hannah is also an accomplished poet, see her website for more information on her poetry books.

“My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (OCT 8, 2011)

In Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers, Chip Linton is a forty-year-old commercial airline pilot who is traumatized when, through no fault of his own, one of his regional planes goes down in Lake Champlain. In the aftermath of the accident, Chip, Emily, and their ten-year-old twin daughters, Hallie and Garnet, move from Pennsylvania to an isolated three-story Victorian near Bethel, New Hampshire, in the scenic White Mountains. Emily resumes her career as a lawyer, the kids enroll in the local school, and Chip becomes a do-it-yourselfer, replacing wallpaper, painting, and doing carpentry around the rickety old house.

Unfortunately, Chip is an emotional wreck who sees a psychiatrist to treat his depression, guilt, and anxiety. He has upsetting flashbacks and vivid nightmares and knows that his career in aviation is most likely over. Although Chip adores Emily and his daughters, they are not enough for him. He cannot help but mourn the loss of his livelihood.

The Lintons soon have concrete reasons to regret their move to Northern New England. There is something creepy going on in this town. The place is filled with greenhouses. Various herbalists and botanists grow exotic plants, talk like aging hippies, and constantly bring over homemade food that they foist on the Linton family. In addition, it is possible that the Linton house, which was once the scene of an untimely and unnatural death, may be haunted. If Chip was teetering on the brink of madness before he moved to New Hampshire, living here may very well push him over the edge. The Night Strangers is a tale of psychological horror in which Chip and Emily gradually suspect that when they relocated, they may have jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Chip starts having visions and hearing voices; his family is also under threat from others who are up to no good. How will the Lintons cope with the various forces threatening to tear them apart?

Chris Bohjalian has always been an outstanding descriptive writer who uses setting brilliantly. He has a gift for creating sympathetic characters with whom the reader can readily identify. This time, alas, he may have bitten off more than he can chew. Chris’s mental deterioration alone would have been a strong enough centerpiece to this book. Even adding a haunted house into the mix might work. However, Bohjalian overreaches when he veers too far into Stephen King and Ira Levin territory. He concocts an outlandish (yet oddly predictable) plot that throws the book seriously out of balance. What should have been a compelling narrative about the demons that inhabit our minds becomes, quite literally, a story about evil incarnate. Still, Bohjalian creates readable dialogue, brings Chip, Emily, and their girls to life, and engages our interest in the fate of his protagonists. In spite of ourselves, we hold our breaths, wondering whether this horribly tormented husband, wife, and two children will ever reacquire the peace of mind that they once took for granted.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 252 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chris Bohjalian
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Secrets of Eden Before You Know Kindness The Double Bind

Bibliography:

Bibliography:

• Hangman (1991)
• Past the Bleachers (1992)
• Water Witches (1995)
• Midwives (1997)
• The Laws of Similars (1999)
• Trans-Sister Radio (2000)
• The Buffalo Soldier (2002)
• Before You Know Kindness (2004)
• The Double Bind ( 2007)
• Skeletons at the Feast ( 2008)
• Secrets of Eden (2010)
• The Night Strangers (2011)
• The Sandcastle Girls (2012)
• The Light in the Ruins (July 2013)

Other:

• Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town (2003)

Movies from books:

• Past the Bleachers (1995)

“The eye sockets were sunken; the eyes protruded, a vivid blue; his flesh was a morbid gray. Long blond hair—almost white, albino-looking—hung over his eyes. Once he was forced to break from his labor to cough—and Andrew recognized the noise that had drawn him. The cough combined the bark of a sick animal with a wet, slapping sound. The skeletal man drew his hand across his mouth. Then he looked up. He locked eyes with Andrew.”

Book Review:

Review by Katherine Petersen  (OCT 1, 2011)

Kicked out of his last American boarding school for drugs, Andrew Taylor’s father has sent him to England’s Harrow Academy to redo his senior year. It’s his last chance, and Andrew tries hard to follow the rules and not bring attention to himself. But author Justin Evans has other plans for Andrew in The White Devil, his latest thriller/horror novel that sheds light on the bullying and other nastiness that can go on at boarding schools past and present.

Andrew witnesses the murder of his friend, Theo, on a path near the school’s graveyard, but he can’t give all the details to the police. No one would ever believe that a ghost, for that is all Andrew can come up with for an explanation of the albino-type figure that killed his friend and then vanished.

Rumors abound of the Lot Ghost, a ghost that haunts the house-turned-dorm in which Andrew lives. But there’s much more to this mystery that’s gradually revealed. Andrew bears a strong resemblance to Byron and is cast as the lead in the school play about the Harrow alumnus, written and directed by Piers Fawkes, a poet and master at Lot. Andrew’s other confidante and love interest is Persephone, the only girl at Harrow, the daughter of the school’s headmaster. What Andrew can piece together is that his friends’ lives are in danger, and if he can’t find out the mystery with Lord Byron at its center, he may die as well.

Life at Harrow lies at the center of Evans’s tale. He combines the bullying and torrid relationships of the past with the goings-on in the present, moving easily between the two. Our hero, Andrew, with his resemblance to Byron, links the two eras together. There’s a chance he can solve the mystery of who the ghost is and why people are dying with the help of Fawkes, Persephone and a library researcher, but time may run out on him.

My only pet peeve with this book is that the author tries to do too much. Add in Fawkes problem with alcohol, a speech Andrew has planned for speech day and some of the story threads get dropped without becoming fully developed. That said, Evans does a nice job of pulling the reader into the story and maintaining enough tension and hints to keep one’s focus.

I have a penchant for books with boarding schools at their center as well as those with historical settings in part or in whole, so I enjoyed the story immensely. Part horror and part thriller, there are enough creepy, very realistic moments in the story to give out shivers. Evans has a talent for vivid descriptions too, and some weren’t so pretty. While I don’t think the novel has any profound messages to pass along, fans of historical settings, Lord Byron or boarding schools should give it a whirl. Just don’t turn out the lights if it’s late.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (May 10, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Katherine Petersen
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Justin Evans
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse The Twelfth Enchantment by David Liss

Bibliography:

• A Good and Happy Child (2007)
• The White Devil (May 2011)

“… What happened? He thinks, and marvels that he can recall human speech. With great effort, Tucker draws himself onto his hands and knees and crawls down the breezeway to her shut bedroom door. He puts his eye against her keyhole.

There, Cora Alley, freshly dismounted, is wriggling back into the soft folds of empty arms and legs; she, too, returning to her human skin.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAR 3, 2011)

Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman is a tale of intergenerational witches that takes place in four different time frames between the 1930’s and the present. The plot moves back and forth between generations and characters. This requires a bit of concentration, but is well worth the effort. It has something of the fears that rise from ghost stories told around a campfire.

The novel begins with Eddie lying down prepared to die. He is in the casket he inherited from his mother, Cora Alley. Eddie has cancer and has taken an overdose of pills. He has left a message for his daughter, Wallis, to call him. For twenty years Eddie was Captain Casket, campy horror show host, and this is the casket from which he would rise during his TV show.

When Eddie was young, a couple came through his home community of Panther Gap in Appalachia to document rural life for the WPA. The two are Tucker, a writer and Sophie, a photographer. Tucker injures Eddie when Eddie runs without warning in front of the car. Tucker and Sophie take the injured Eddie home to recover, but no one is there when they arrive. While waiting for Eddie’s mother, Cora, to come home Tucker shows Eddie an antique horror movie. Just then Cora comes home from a day collecting ginseng roots. Cora’s impact on Tucker is profound.

Cora is a mountain witch, someone who crawls out of her skin at night and then rides men like they were horses. She rides them to exhaustion. If she fancies a man, she will ride him over and over until he is not much good to anyone else; not his wife; not his employer. Cora rides Tucker on successive nights. He is sexually stimulated, humiliated and completely exhausted. He asks Eddie how to avoid being kept in a witch’s power. Eddie tells Tucker never to loan anything to a witch or you are hers forever, but Tucker loans the movie to Cora. The next thing we see is Tucker running through the woods shedding clothing as some creature, we presume the panther of Panther Gap, devours him.

Wallis is Eddie’s daughter, the granddaughter of Cora and is also a witch. Like Cora, she harnesses a powerful sexual appetite. Near the end of Eddie’s career as Captain Casket and when Wallis was on the verge of adolescence, Eddie and his wife take in Jasper, a homeless young man. Jasper has been hanging around the TV station where Eddie works, and Eddie has become fond of the young man. Jasper’s intrusion into the family is a burden to twelve-year-old Wallis. She is constantly provoked by Jasper for whom she develops a powerful sexual attraction. The day after Eddie’s twenty-year reign as a horror show host is over, Eddie, Jasper and Wallis leave town and travel to Panther Gap to Cora’s home in the mountains. While they are there the ghost-story atmosphere intensifies. Jasper, Wallis and Eddie find the remnants of Tucker’s clothing confirming the tale Eddie told Jasper of Cora’s role in Tucker’s disappearance.

Wallis is currently an anchorwoman. The dying Eddie left her a phone message while she was on the air. You get the sense that Wallis is annoyed with Eddie. In the afterglow of her show she has not checked her messages, going instead, as she does regularly, to have a sexual fling with Jeff, one of the crew. Jeff’s come-on to Wallis is the revelation that the Jeff was a card-carrying fan of Captain Casket. Wallis has her fling and then tries to get a ride home, but it is late and the car doesn’t come. Dogs howl in the night and she is afraid. She remembers what happened at Panther Gap and what happened to Jasper in the aftermath. Then she listens to Eddie’s phone massage, a slurred reference to going on a ginseng hunt, their code for an adventure. Jasper, too, went on a ginseng hunt; so did Tucker. Wallis screams and Jeff takes her back into his apartment to comfort her. She feels compelled to tell the ghost story about the visit to Panther Gap by Wallis, Eddie and Jasper.

Being witches, Wallis and Cora bend men to their wills often to tragic ends. Witchcraft can be seen in light of the war between the sexes. A witch is the embodiment of women’s powers and their sexuality. For men, a witch is to be feared and desired. For women such as Wallis, a witch is what you become when the power of your magical thinking comes to pass. In some ways Witches on the Road Tonight reinforces a masculine objectification of powerful women as witches. The female protagonists are all powerful women; they all manipulate their men.

I really enjoyed the book and recommend it highly. It is an extremely well-written and pleasantly complex adult ghost story.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sheri Holman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More mountain magic: Bloodroot by Amy Green

Bibliography:

• The Stolen Tongue (1997)
• The Dress Lodger (2000)
• The Mammoth Cheese (2004)
• Witches on the Road Tonight (March 2011)

For Kids:

• Sondok: Princess of the Moon and Stars (2002)

“On June 21, 2006, at seven a.m. in a malarial crossroads named Hope, Florida, the thermometer old Mrs. Hickok had nailed to the Welcome to Hope sign fifteen years prior read ninety-two degrees. It would get a lot hotter that day, and there was plenty of time for it to do so, this being the summer solstice. But ninety-two at seven a.m., sunrise occurring only three hours earlier, suggested a harsh reckoning was in store for this swampy southern outpost.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose (MAY 2, 2010)

Clarissa Burden is having a bad day. It’s hot, her marriage is stuck in a bad place, her writing is even worse. A two-time bestselling novelist, she hasn’t written a decent sentence in thirteen months. Instead she pours her mental creativity into fantasizing about the accidental (but not necessarily unwelcome) death of Iggy, her verbally abusive artist husband, sixteen years her senior. After seven years of marriage, Iggy largely ignores Clarissa and instead focuses his attention on photographing and sketching young, pretty nudes in Clarissa’s back garden. He hasn’t touched his wife in years. He resents and scorns her commercial success even as he milks the financial benefits. Things are not good.

Iggy and Clarissa are not the only occupants of the majestic old house Clarissa bought six months earlier. Nearly two hundred years earlier a Spanish woman, Olga Villada and Amaziah, her common-law husband, a free black under Spanish law, lived here with their young son, but were brutally murdered. Now, their spectral presences roam the house. Mysterious sounds—the strains of violin playing, the rolling of a child’s ball upstairs—distract Clarissa, as does the one-armed tree-cutter at her door, who is not what he appears to be. Even the fly in the kitchen (whose thoughts the reader is privy to) won’t leave her alone today.

Iggy, ignoring Clarissa, takes the car and flits off to lunch with the models, leaving Clarissa with only the decrepit old pick-up for transportation, which holds four months’ worth of decomposing trash. A trip to the dump commences a chain of bizarre events that will serve to change her life. A detour to a cemetery populated by the mournful, murmuring spirits of women and children who died from abuse and neglect. A stop at a roadside restaurant that produces a new friend and soon after, a new car. There is an encounter with a boy and his pet rattlesnake, the spectacle of a dwarf carnival being unloaded and set up outside town. Another visitation from the ghost family back at the house, where Olga Villada spectrally nudges a dossier into view, citing her as the original owner of hundreds of acres of land, the house, and including other burning facts, previously unknown to Clarissa.

One of Fowler’s particular skills as a writer is the interweaving the spirit realm within her stories. All get their chance to speak: the spirit women and children at the old cemetery; Olga Villada, Amaziah and their young son; the one-armed tree cutter, whose identity and purpose are ultimately revealed. Even the fly becomes a ghost here and has his say (a case of unrequited love toward Clarissa, even after she squashed him dead).

Despite this, however, there are times when the story comes off as curiously un-magical. Granted, the language is always polished and descriptive, with Iggy a convincing, if one-dimensional villain. The situations and secondary characters are quirky and lively. But the breezy humor, which has worked so well in Fowler’s other novels (notably in The Problem With Murmur Lee ) falls flat here. Sometimes, in truth, the prose approaches chick-lit goofy. Clarissa is counseled throughout the story by her “ovarian shadow women” a chorus of advisors whose voices alternately resemble Bea Arthur, Christiane Amanpour (a CNN correspondent, in case you’re dim like me and didn’t catch the analogy), the Wicked Witch of the West and a hero version of herself called Super Dame. They are soon joined by an inner Deepak Chopra who sports big red sunglasses studded with ruby rhinestones and spouts soothing New Age platitudes. Deepak and the Greek chorus of girlfriends are funny for the first few references, but soon lose their novelty and efficacy. And the fly’s digressions? They grow so annoying you just want to kill the damned thing to shut it up, only it’s a ghost so you’re pretty much stuck with it.

It’s as if Clarissa—and perhaps the writer—are caught up in jokey, digressive prose as a way to avoid exploring a bigger story here, the painful, difficult-to-tell one. Only the side stories of Olga Villada and her family, the trip to the cemetery, and references to Clarissa’s childhood under an abusive mother seem to reveal true heart.

Fowler has proven herself, in past efforts, to be a magical, wondrously talented writer, fearless about plumbing the depths of painful issues, including domestic abuse, alcoholism and death, but never without that touch of magic and redemptive love that tempers the story so well. Sugar Cage, her 1991 critically acclaimed debut, is deserving of all its praise. The voodoo mysticism, the humanity of the characters, the inviting way the prose allows you into each of the several narrators’ stories, all heralded the arrival of a talented writer, which she continued to demonstrate in ensuing novels. Before Women Had Wings (1996) is a riveting, bittersweet story with its young protagonist who allows us to witness the magic of youth right along the girl’s hardship and unspeakable pain. The Problem With Murmur Lee (2006) uses humor and lively characters to explore the life and tragic death of Murmur Lee, hitting such a pitch-perfect note that the reader can’t help but read and read. No easy feat, any of these. Difficult acts to follow.

In the end it takes Clarissa’s visiting writing friend, Leo Adams, a former student and admirer, to break the meandering, digressive bonds that seem to be holding both character and writer back. Over a shared meal of burgers and fries, Adams and Clarissa leaf through the dossier that reveals the full story behind Olga Villada’s house, the violence, destruction, racism and hatred. “This is your story,” Adams tells Clarissa. “This is what you ought to be writing.”

“She looked at him; his eyes appeared lit with a certainty that Clarissa could not bear. How could she explain that he had no idea what a dark and dangerous place her internal landscape really was? She wanted to agree with him. He would like that. It would make for nice chitchat. But she couldn’t. She could not lie about her current capacity—which was zero—to immerse herself in horrors committed by monstrous men. What amounted to a hypersensitivity to torture or cruelty […] prevented Clarissa from agreeing with Adams or admitting to herself that perhaps the story of Olga and Amaziah Archer was what the blank, mocking virtual pages of her word processor were waiting for. In her mind, the letters lined up: RISK. And then she revised the one-word directive, turning it into a two-word warning: TOO RISKY.”

In this passage, I felt like I was seeing Clarissa—and the author—the real ones and not the jokey, digressive ones, understanding their issues and fears, for the first time. Boom. Magic. And in the ensuing scene, the confidences exchanged with Adams, his words of support and empowerment, we find the redemptive love Clarissa’s story so sorely needs, giving her the power to finally confront the now-despicable Iggy and spread her wings and fly.

How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly is a very different book from Fowler’s other efforts. It’s like Connie May Fowler Lite. She is, nonetheless, a worthy writer to read, and while this effort might disappoint some fans, others might find this lighter touch to be more to their liking. Because, in truth, the full octane writing in her other novels can be heavy stuff indeed. But they are all treasures. They are a product of writer who has mined her inner landscape, probably at great personal cost, to produce some real gems.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grand Central Publishing; 1 edition (April 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Connie May Fowler
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our short reviews of: Sugar Cage Before Women Had Wings

Bibliography:

• Sugar Cage (1992)
• River of Hidden Dreams (1994)
• Before Women Had Wings (1996)
• Remembering Blue (2000)
• The Problem with Murmur Lee (2005)
• How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly (2010)

Other:

• When Katie Wakes: A Memoir (2002)

Movies from books:

• Before Women Had Wings (1997)

“The girl moved like water itself, unthinkingly toward the darkening horizon. She was only sixteen, or maybe seventeen. A brilliant red sari clung to her body. Tangled hair lashed at her face.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (MAR 31, 2010)

It’s 1960 and partitioned India is rife with factions, superstitions, violence and oppression.

The Mittal household, living in a rambling bungalow in the old colonial enclave of Malabar Hill, Bombay, presents a comfortable, serene exterior to the world. But behind the walls, amid the remnants of British raj furnishings and “the aroma of sandalwood, peppers and fried cumin,” the extended family seethes with desire and discontent.

At the center of the story is Pinky, still more child than woman at 13. Left motherless at partition, she was claimed as an infant by Maji, the formidable matriarch in a white widow’s sari, who rules the household although crippled with obesity. Pinky may be Maji’s favorite but her aunt Savita despises the child. “She’s not your sister, she would admonish her sons whenever Maji was out of earshot, she’s your destitute cousin. Remember that.”

Savita’s husband, Maji’s only son, Jaginder, head of the family shipbreaking business, sneaks out every night to get drunk. The twins, 14, are rambunctious and teasing though not cruel. But the eldest boy, Nimish, 17, has always been kind to Pinky. Too kind, perhaps.

Pinky is devastated to discover late one night that her cherished Nimish is in love with the girl next door, a girl even more sheltered than Pinky. In her anger, hoping Nimish will come out of his room to stop her, Pinky unbolts the door to the children’s bath, a door that has been strictly bolted every night of her life.

Though at first no one else in the house is aware, Pinky has unleashed the unsettled ghosts of a tragedy that shattered the household 13 years earlier. Disbelieved by everyone, menaced by the ghost no one else perceives, Pinky gropes for understanding – hoping to appease the ghost with empathy.

But the ghost is having none of that and as the torrential monsoon breaks the stifling heat, tensions within the family – at first lulled by the cooling rains – reach a shattering point.

Agarwal, a native of Bombay, now living in Los Angeles, sets the arc of this debut novel to the rhythm of India’s climate. The parched heat strains tempers, and the still air lies heavy with secrets. The first monsoon rains bring giddy relief, renewing married love and awakening forbidden young hopes before the relentless wetness seeps into every crack and corner of the place, sprouting mold and hastening decay.

Her prose is rich with aromas and colors and tactile sensations. The magic realism of spirits and superstitions festoon the daily routines of everyday. Women’s lives are homebound and prescribed by virtue and duty (until cursed by widowhood), but men’s bonds, though less visible, are nearly as restricting.

The characters grow as the novel progresses, particularly those who seem at first to be almost background – the servants, especially Parvita, a formidable woman who has already survived more than most. And Agarwal branches out to include the sprawling city – from the Christian bars to the stultifying slums (where the shipbreaking company’s workers live) and the terrifying underworld of criminals and mystical tantriks.

A captivating, transporting novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soho Press (April 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Shilpa Agarwal
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another ghost story: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Bibliography:

• Haunting Bombay (April 2009)

“Is that so surprising, with things for that family so bleak? The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of these corners. Let’s call it a – a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop – to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this ‘little stranger’ grow into? A sort of shadow self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr. Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, malice, and frustration….”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (DEC 19, 2009)

With The Little Stranger author Sarah Waters departs from the settings, characters and style of her first three historical novels, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith, all set in Victorian England. Nor is this book like her more recent The Night Watch, a sensitive and passionate love story set in wartime England. The Little Stranger is a sinister, Hitchcockian-like tale of a haunted house, ghosts and madness. It provides a most chilling, unputdownable read.

It was the summer of 1919, almost a year after the end of World War I, when the boy, (Faraday, our narrator), first saw Hundreds Hall, the Ayres’ family estate in Warwickshire, England. His mother used to work at the Hall as a servant. The event that brought him there was an “Empire Day fete.” He and other local children made the Boy Scout salute, received commemorative medals and had tea. Although no one was allowed inside the main house, an impressive building of the Georgian period, his mother still had connections with the servants, so mother and son quietly entered by a side door. The boy was awed by all he saw. Such riches! To him this was a magnificent mansion, owned for generations by people way above his social class. Years later, he was to remember the building’s elegantly aging beauty, the “worn red brick, the cockled windows, the weathered sandstone edgings,” and the extraordinary gardens, the like of which he had never seen or experienced outside of churches. He was thrilled by the polished wooden floors, “the patina on the wooden chairs and cabinets, the bevel of a looking glass, the scroll of frame.” Hundreds Hall is to play as big a role in this novel as any living character.

Young Faraday was an obedient boy, however he suddenly did something totally out of character. He was fascinated by one of the white walls “which had a decorative plaster border – a representation of acorns and leaves.” He took out his pocket knife and pried one of the acorns loose. It really wasn’t an act of vandalism, although others might think so. He merely wanted to possess a piece of such grandeur.

The Ayres family was, by no means, part of the blue-blooded nobility….just moneyed country squires, to the manor bred. At this time, Mrs. Ayres was in her early twenties and quite lovely. Her husband was just a few years older. The couple had a little girl, six year-old Susan, upon whom they doted. Their happiness was not to last.

Post WWII England was a time of great economic and social change. Clement Richard Attlee, a British Labour Party politician, had been in office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for just about one year – not long enough yet to impact the country’s flailing economy – the UK’s most significant problem at the time. The war effort had left Britain nearly bankrupt. WWII had cost the country about a quarter of its national wealth. This meant that strict rationing of food and other essential goods were continued in the post war period. Many families of the nobility and upper classes found themselves with their fortunes greatly diminished by two world wars, and, unable to afford all the servants it took to maintain their estates, rooms were closed off. Mansions crumbled. As the middle class grew, the opulent lifestyles of the rich and famous decreased. Hundreds Hall, and its gradual decline, seem to parallel the country’s reduced circumstances. An entire British way of life that had lasted for centuries was dying.

Almost thirty years after that first visit, the boy, now a country doctor and a very lonely, disappointed man, returns to Hundreds Hall. He is called to the mansion by members of the Ayres family to treat a sick maid. Dr. Faraday is struck dumb as he drives up to the house. His memory of its former grandeur clash with the reality of its present degeneration, which horrifies him. The mansion and grounds have been left to rot and molder, the once beautiful gardens are unkempt and filled with weeds and dried ivy. The family is selling off enormous land holdings in order to keep their home. They subsist on the meager income of the remaining dairy farm.

The family has changed as significantly as their mansion, and are, perhaps, in even worse condition. The husband/father died at a relatively young age, and the beloved Susan died of diphtheria while still a child. Mrs. Ayres has never gotten over her terrible grief at the loss of her daughter – her “one true love.” It is unclear if she is even capable of loving her other children, born after Susan’s death. The Ayres son, Roderick, has been left mentally and physically damaged by the war. Caroline, the plain and eccentric daughter, with her stocky build and hairy legs, seems to be the most mentally stable person in the family. She has long accepted the fact that she will remain a spinster….for who would marry a plain, penniless woman?

There is something oddly unnatural about Hundreds Hall. Faraday first hears of the haunting when he initially visits to treat the maid. She complains that this “isn’t like a proper house at all. Its too big and so quiet it gives you the creeps.” There is something malevolent within – furniture moves, strange stains appear on the walls, footsteps can be heard coming from the deserted rooms on the top floor, doorknobs turn but when the door is opened, no one is there. Whispers are heard from unknown sources and the eerie events become truly frightening when some family members are physically hurt. There is a mysterious fire in Rodrick’s room which almost kills him. The gentle family dog uncharacteristically bites a young girl and has to be put down. Mrs. Ayres, who spends most of the time dreaming of past glories, shows signs of marks and scratches on her body. The external haunting and the family’s internal turmoil seem to merge as the tension continues to build throughout the storyline.

After treating his patient, Faraday is invited to tea, and despite the differences in classes he becomes a close friend of the family which seems to depend on him – his kindness, practicality and stability. Local physicians were never treated as social equals by landed gentry like the Ayreses before the war. The doctor is thrilled by his new upper class connections, especially as he in unable to forget his own humble beginnings, nor how his shopkeeper father and servant mother sacrificed to send him to medical school.

The author spends more than the first 100 pages setting the gothic scenario with the haunted house as the center of activity. Faraday, ever the scientist, refuses to accept any supernatural explanation for the events at Hundreds Hall. A colleague tells him, “that the cause might be “some dark germ, some ravenous, shadow-creature, some ‘little stranger,’ spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself.”

Scary as the book may be at times, this is much more than a ghost story or historical thriller. There are many different threads woven into this tale. Ms. Waters’ characters come to life on the page, along with their conflicting emotions about their situations and the changing times. Faraday is a superb narrator, although not totally reliable, (obvious to the reader), due to his lack of confidence about class differences. Contradictorily, he has a strong sense of confidence about his education and abilities as a doctor. He also lacks objectivity because of his conflicting feelings about each of the Ayres family members.

This is a most original take on the genre, although a bit too long. The writing could have been tighter at times. Kudos to Sarah Waters, who never disappoints, (at least she never disappoints me)! I highly recommend this book, especially to fans of Alfred Hitchcock – rather than those of Stephen King. Although King fans, like me, might like The Little Stranger too.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 116 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition edition (April 30, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AMAZON PAGE:	The Little Stranger
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sarah Waters
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Fingersmith

Bibliography:

• Tipping the Velvet (1998)
• Affinity (1999)
• Fingersmith (January 2002)
• The Night Watch (March 2006)
• The Little Stranger
  (May 2009)

Movies from Books:

• Fingersmith (2005)